This Torana is a good example of my metal working skills and car restoration experience. It had damaged and rusted out rails so they needed to be replaced. The customer wanted a smoothed out firewall and smooth inner gaurds. The rail tops I custom made and I formed new inner guards. But before all this work took place, the firewall, A pillars and rails had to be restored.
The Torana of this era have rust problems, so if you have one it will most likely be there in the usual spots. Doing a rail replacement is a big job, it is time consuming and hard to find second hand rails good enough to use. The above pic shows the finished firewall, ready to install the replacement rails.
The pic below shows the replacement rails installed and the above pic show the new box section I made to tie the rail into the outer sill rockers. This pic was taken just before I welded it in place. A keen eye will notice the clearance area for wide tyres when at full steering lock. I formed this in new metal and installed it to look factory as part of the A pillar repairs.
Care has to be taken to use the same thickness metal when replacing the inner guards like this. There are thicker pieces of metal in the highly stressed parts of the structure, I also have to pay attention to factory swages, folds, original spot welds and construction methods that give the car it's strength. I have to duplicate this perfectly and execute the workmanship to make the car as strong or better than it was. Small changes in shape made for header pipe clearance, yet done in such a way, so as to enhance the strength in that area of the rails.
The rego had run out on this Torana, so all the work had to be repaired to ensure it would pass a roadworthy. Even if it had not run out, the roadworthy process for an old car is not fun, so I am mindfull of this when I do the work. To me this means it had to be factory stock to look at, and retain the factory way the Holden Engineers constructed these panels, how they folded and where they put the welds. I can see why the factory engineers built stuff in a certain way and see where they envisaged the stress points would be and how they incorporated strength in panel thickness, panel shape and joints. Using good engineering practices during the work I can add strength along the way, basically doing a great restoration job.
Sure I could have gone for a completely custom front end new design, with RHS rails, no inner guards or more custom looking inners ..... whatever ..... I can do all of that. Just note that now you fall into a different set of rules for rego, it is not a restored car anymore, now it becomes a custom modified car and you need to be well funded to go down that path.
This is not a product it is an example of my metal working and car restoration skills. Priced From as indicated.
All work is done at our standard hourly rate + parts + materials.
As a footnote:
A good example of how bad the rust can be once the paint is stripped back was this SS Torana Hatch back. It looked like a straight forward tidy up, it was an imaculate car just with some ware and tare here and there. Old repairs that were hidden by filler and paint were revealled once stripped back to bare metal. In this example an engine bay tydy up turned into complete front rail replacement and 'A' pillar rust repairs before I could get into any of the original sheet metal work required. I mention this here because if you start a restoration like this and you don't have considerable extra funding behind you to cover any down side, you will have an unfinished car sitting in your shed that you cannot drive and it will be worth a lot less than it did before you started. So if you have a driving car that is fun, but it is a bit down, if you are short on funds, just keep the maintenance up and enjoy the car as it is.
